This is intended to be a fun, tongue in cheek blog post for you. No you won’t have to rigidly sit there in your seat reading through our latest boastful adventures whilst inwardly hating us. We hope instead that you can relax and afford a chuckle to yourself as you read on.

After the most recent blog post from our trip to Seattle and Tahoe we received a few humorous emails from close friends who seemingly enjoy reading about our travels, trials and tribulations. It’s always great to hear that there are people out there who enjoy the read.

Writing the posts are a time consuming effort and uploading pictures can take an age depending on our internet connection!

What drives us most to keep the blog going is the fact that this site will ultimately become our online family memories. A pictorial family story book of the biggest and best time we will likely ever spend together. A resource for us to all be able to dip into and reminisce about for many many decades to come. It’s also of course the easiest way for friends and family to follow what we have been up to and we hope you all enjoy reading the posts.

A favourite family picture taken in Peppermint Grove Beach, south of Perth Australia.

From time to time we are contacted by complete strangers who have stumbled upon our site and have emailed us to ask for advice, are travelling themselves, or just want to say hi and that they have ben inspired by our travels and life choice.

The latest approach however was of a slightly different nature.

Wait....what?

As you can see from the snapshot above we have been asked if we would like to partner with a company called Clever Travel Companion to help them sell their product, which on the face of it seems to be a load of old pants!

Well, in fairness it’s not all completely pants, there are some tee shirts and leggings too, oh and a bright orange travel plug, but mainly pants.

Our initial thought was ‘How on earth can we help this company sell something we have never used or are ever likely to use?’

We can’t imagine any of our friends or family actually being interested in our ‘pants recommendation' either. But then we reminded ourselves that it’s not just our close friends and family that read the blog nowadays. Somedays we have upwards of 600 hits to the blog, which in the grand scheme of things, is of course deemed tiny and pitiful among ‘professional blogger types’, but we have never advertised our blog nor intend to, the traffic until this point has been purely organic.

So this got us to asking ourselves a few questions…..

Who are these people?

How did they find our site?

Why do they visit the site?

Aaaand just perhaps, might they be interested in some rather tight looking pants?

If so, could we duly point them in the direction of Clever Travel Comapnion?

You may well wonder how the whole thing works and what it is we have been asked to do.

In a nutshell (pun intended? Oh dear).

By partnering with Clever Travel Companion we have now become an ‘Official Company Affiliate’ and stand to earn a pant dropping 10% commission on any orders placed via clicking through to their site from our link.

Imagine that........ if you order a $15 pair of pants, we make $1.50.......

CHAAAAAACHING!!

Dan's new sunglasses.

So without further ado, ladies and gentleman, we are honoured to introduce you to Clever Travel Companion.

Our time in San Francisco had come to an end and we can safely say we pretty much nailed our stay there. Although we were sad to leave Rich and Dev, we had no regrets of missing any sights or adventures in the city.

Our drive North West to Truckee near Lake Tahoe was supposed to be 3.5- 4 hours, however, we had no idea that we were travelling over Memorial Day weekend and were stuck in traffic for pretty much most of the journey. It took us almost 6.5 hours in the end, with only one brief stop. The kids were great, especially poor Sophia who threw up most of the journey with what we thought was acute travel sickness (the roads were very straight) but in retrospect was actually a niggly 24 hour sickness bug, which of course worked it’s way around us all over the next few days.

Thankfully upon our arrival we found that our homeswap property was amazing, a huge log cabin in the woods. It had such a homely feel and we were so glad of the 'one touch to light' big fire as soon as we arrived as temperatures had plummeted and we were all freezing!

Fond memories, perhaps a future place to learn how to ski?

Venturing out the next day we headed to The Squaw Valley, home of the 1960 Winter Olympics where there was a small festival taking place for the start of summer. We were lucky enough to find a stubborn patch of ice and snow for the kids to have a play on!

Riding high on the wave of Dan's tweeting success in San Francisco he decided to send a Tweet to local Truckee resident Chris Sacca, a billionaire venture capitalist and probably the biggest private investor in Twitter.

Another success for direct contact on Twitter, Chris even visited our blog and commended our family adventure!